EL, GO THROUGH THE COLFAX WOMAN'S CLOTHES. Amelia, would you help him?"

She offered him another pleasant nod, the sort meant for polite society. Rhyme realized he was really quite angry with her.

At the tech's direction she pulled on latex gloves, gently opened the clothing and ran a horsehair brush through the garments, above large sheets of clean newsprint. Tiny flecks fell out. Cooper picked them up on tape and examined them through the compound 'scope.

"Not much," he reported. "The steam took care of most of the trace. I see a little soil. Not enough to D-G. Wait... Excellent. I've got a couple of fibers. Look at these..."

Well, I can't, Rhyme thought angrily.

"Navy blue, acrylic-and-wool blend, I'd guess. It isn't coarse enough to be carpet and it's not lobed. So it's clothing."

"In this heat he's not going to be wearing thick socks or a sweater. Ski mask?"

"That'd be my bet," Cooper said.

Rhyme reflected, "So he's serious about giving us a chance to save them. If he was bent on killing, it wouldn't matter if they saw him or not."

Sellitto added, "Also means the asshole thinks he can get away. Doesn't have suicide on his mind. Might just give us some bargaining power if he's got hostages when we nail him."

"I like that optimism of yours, Lon," Rhyme said.

Thom answered the buzzer and a moment later Jim Polling climbed the stairs, looking disheveled and harried. Well, shuttling between press conferences, the mayor's office and the federal building would do that to you.

"Too bad about the trout," Sellitto called to him. Then explained to Rhyme, "Jimmy here's one of those real fishermen. Ties his own flies and everything. Me, I go out on a party boat with a six-pack and I'm happy."

"We'll nail this fucker then worry about the fish," Polling said, helping himself to the coffee Thom had left by the window. He looked outside and blinked in surprise to find two large birds staring at him. He turned back to Rhyme and explained that because of the kidnapping he'd had to postpone a fishing trip to Vermont. Rhyme had never fished — never had the time or inclination for any hobbies — but he found he envied Polling. The serenity of fishing appealed to him. It was a sport you could practice in solitude. Crip sports tended to be in-your-face athletics. Competitive. Proving things to the world... and to yourself. Wheelchair basketball, tennis, marathons. Rhyme decided if he had to have a sport it'd be fishing. Though casting a line with a single finger was probably beyond modern technology.

Polling said, "The press is calling him a serial kidnapper."

If the bootie fits, Rhyme reflected.

"And the mayor's going nuts. Wants to call in the feds. I talked the chief into sitting tight on that one. But we can't lose another vic."

"We'll do our best," Rhyme said caustically.

Polling sipped the black coffee and stepped close to the bed. "You okay, Lincoln?"

Rhyme said, "Fine."

Polling appraised him for a moment longer then nodded to Sellitto. "Brief me. We got another press conference in a half hour. You see the last one? Hear what that reporter asked? What did we think the vic's family felt about her being scalded to death?"

Banks shook his head. "Man."

"I nearly decked the fucker," Polling said.

Three and a half years ago, Rhyme recalled, during the cop-killer investigation, the captain had smashed a news crew's videocam when the reporter wondered if Polling was being too aggressive in his investigations just because the suspect, Dan Shepherd, was a member of the force.

Polling and Sellitto retired to a corner of Rhyme's room and the detective filled him in. When the captain descended the stairs this time, Rhyme noticed, he wasn't half as buoyant as he had been.

"Okay," Cooper announced. "We've got a hair. It was in her pocket."

"The whole shaft?" Rhyme asked, without much hope, and was not surprised when Cooper sighed. "Sorry. No bulb."

Without a bulb attached, hair isn't individuated evidence; it's merely class evidence. You can't run a DNA test and link it to a specific person. Still, it has good probative value. The famous Canadian Mounties study a few years ago concluded that if a hair found at the scene matches a suspect's hair the odds are around 4,500 to 1 that he's the one who left it. The problem with hair, though, is that you can't deduce much about the person it belonged to. Sex is almost impossible to determine, and race can't be reliably established. Age can be estimated only with infant hair. Color is deceptive because of wide pigmentation variations and cosmetic dyes, and since everybody loses dozens of hairs every day you can't even tell if the suspect is going bald.

"Check it against the vic's. Do a scale count and medulla pigmentation comparison," Rhyme ordered.

A moment later Cooper looked up from the 'scope. "It's not hers, the Colfax woman's."

"Description?" asked Rhyme.

"Light brown. No kink so I'd say not Negroid. Pigmentation suggests it's not Mongoloid."

"So Caucasian," Rhyme said, nodding at the chart on the wall. "Confirms what the wit said. Head or body hair?"

"There's little diameter variation and a uniform pigment distribution. It's head hair."

"Length?"

"Three centimeters."

Thom asked if he should add to the profile that the kidnapper had brown hair.

Rhyme said no. "We'll wait for some corroboration. Just write down that we know he wears a ski mask, navy blue. Fingernail scrapings, Mel?"

Cooper examined the trace but found nothing useful.

"The print you found. The one on the wall. Let's take a look at it. Could you show it to me, Amelia?"

Sachs hesitated then carried the Polaroid over to him.

"Your monster," Rhyme said. It was a large deformed palm, indeed grotesque, not with the elegant swirls and bifurcations of friction ridges but a mottled pattern of tiny lines.

"It's a wonderful picture — you're a virtual Edward Weston, Amelia. But unfortunately it's not a hand. Those aren't ridges. It's a glove. Leather. Old. Right, Mel?"

The technician nodded.

"Thom, write down that he has an old pair of gloves." Rhyme said to the others, "We're starting to get some ideas about him. He's not leaving his FR prints at the scene. But he is leaving glove prints. If we find the glove in his possession we can still place him at the scene. He's smart. But not brilliant."

Sachs asked, "And what do brilliant criminals wear?"

"Cotton-lined suede," Rhyme said. Then asked, "Where's the filter? From the vacuum?"

The technician emptied the cone filter — like one from a coffee-maker — onto a sheet of white paper.

Trace evidence...

DAs and reporters and juries loved obvious clues. Bloody gloves, knives, recently fired guns, love letters, semen and fingerprints. But Lincoln Rhyme's favorite evidence was trace — the dust and effluence at crime scenes, so easily overlooked by perps.

But the vacuum had captured nothing helpful.

"All right," Rhyme said, "let's move on. Let's look at the handcuffs."

Sachs stiffened as Cooper opened the plastic bag and slid the cuffs out onto a sheet of newsprint. There was, as Rhyme had predicted, minimal blood. The tour doctor from the medical examiner's office had done the honors with the razor saw, after an NYPD lawyer had faxed a release to the ME.

Cooper examined the cuffs carefully. "Boyd & Keller. Bottom of the line. No serial number." He sprayed the chrome with DFO and hit the PoliLight. "No prints, just a smudge from the glove."

"Let's open them up."

Cooper used a generic cuff key to click them open. With a lens-cleaning air puffer he blew into the mechanism.

"You're still mad at me, Amelia," Rhyme said. "About the hands."

The question caught her off guard. "I wasn't mad," she said after a moment. "I thought it was unprofessional. What you were suggesting."

"Do you know who Edmond Locard was?"

She shook her head.

"A Frenchman. Born in 1877. He founded the University of Lyons' Institute of Criminalistics. He came up with the one rule I lived by when I ran IRD. Locard's Exchange Principle. He thought that whenever two human beings come into contact, something from one is exchanged to the other, and vice versa. Maybe dust, blood, skin cells, dirt, fibers, metallic residue. It might be tough to find exactly what's been exchanged, and even harder to figure out what it means. But an exchange does occur — and because of that we can catch our unsubs."

This bit of history didn't interest her in the least.

"You're lucky," Mel Cooper said to Sachs, not looking up. "He was going to have you and the medic do a spot autopsy and examine the contents of her stomach."

"It would've been helpful," Rhyme said, avoiding her eyes.

"I talked him out of it," Cooper said.

"Autopsy," Sachs said, sighing, as if nothing about Rhyme could surprise her.

Why, she isn't even here, he thought angrily. Her mind's a thousand miles away.

"Ah," Cooper said. "Found something. I think it's a bit of the glove."

Cooper mounted a fleck on the compound microscope. Examined it.

"Leather. Reddish-colored. Polished on one side."

"Red, that's good," Sellitto said. To Sachs he explained, "The wilder their clothes, the easier it is to find the perp. They don't teach you that at the academy, bet. Sometime I'll tell you 'bout the time we collared Jimmy Plaid, from the Gambino crew. You remember that, Jerry?"

"You could spot those pants a mile away," the young detective said.

Cooper continued, "The leather's desiccated. Not much oil in the grain. You were right too about them being old."

"What kind of animal?"

"I'd say kidskin. High quality."

"If they were new it might mean he was rich," Rhyme grumbled. "But since they're old he might've found them on the street or bought them secondhand. No snappy deductions from 823's accessorizing, looks like. Okay. Thom, just add to the profile that the gloves are reddish kidskin. What else do we have?"

"He wears aftershave," Sachs reminded him.

"Forgot that. Good. Maybe to cover up another scent. Unsubs do that sometimes. Write it down, Thom. What did it smell like again, Amelia? You described it."

"Dry. Like gin."

"What about the clothesline?" Rhyme asked.

Cooper examined it. "I've seen this before. Plastic. Several dozen interior filaments composed of six to ten different plastic types and one — no, two — metallic filaments."

"I want a manufacturer and source."

Cooper shook his head. "Impossible. Too generic."

"Damn," Rhyme muttered. "And the knot?"

"Now that's unusual. Very efficient. See how it loops around twice? PVC is the hardest cord to tie and this knot ain't going anywhere."

"They have a knot file downtown?"

"No."

Inexcusable, he thought.

"Sir?"

Rhyme turned to Banks.

"I do some sailing..."

"Out of Westport," Rhyme said.

"Well, as a matter of fact, yeah. How'd you know?"

If there were a forensic test for location of origin Jerry Banks would turn up positive for Connecticut. "Lucky guess."

"It isn't nautical. I don't recognize it."

"That's good to know. Hang it up there." Rhyme nodded toward the wall, next to the Polaroid of the cellophane and the Monet poster. "We'll get to it later."

The doorbell rang and Thom disappeared to answer it. Rhyme had a bad moment thinking that perhaps it was Dr. Berger returning to tell him he was no longer interested in helping him with their "project."

But the heavy thud of boots told Rhyme who had come a-calling.

The Emergency Services officers, all large, all somber, dressed in combat gear, entered the room politely and nodded to Sellitto and Banks. They were men of action and Rhyme bet that behind the twenty still eyes were ten very bad reactions to the sight of a man laid up forever on his back.

"Gentlemen, you've heard about the kidnapping last night and the death of the victim this afternoon." He continued through the affirmative muttering, "Our unsub has another victim. We have a lead in the case and I need you to hit locations around the city and secure evidence. Immediately and simultaneously. One man, one location."

"You mean," one mustachioed officer asked uncertainly, "no backup."

"You won't need it."

"All due respect, sir, I'm not inclined to go into any tactical situation without backup. A partner at least."

"I don't think there'll be any firefights. The targets are the major chain grocery stores in town."

"Grocery stores?"

"Not every store. Just one of every chain. J&G's, ShopRite, Food Warehouse..."

"What exactly are we going to do?"

"Buy veal shanks."

"What?"

"One package at each store. I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to pay from your own pocket, gentlemen. But the city'll reimburse you. Oh, and we need them ASAP."

She lay on her side, immobile.

Her eyes had grown accustomed to the dimness of the old tunnel and she could see the little fuckers moving closer. One in particular she kept her eye on.

Monelle's leg stung like a bitch but most of the pain was in her arm, from where he'd cut deep into her skin. Because it was cuffed behind her she couldn't see the wound, didn't know how much she'd bled. But it must have been a lot; she was very faint and could feel the sticky ooze all over her arms and side.

The sound of scratching — needlish claws on concrete. The gray-brown lumps rustling in the shadows. The rats continued to twitch their way toward her. There must have been a hundred of them.

She forced herself to stay completely still and kept her eyes on the big black one. Schwarzie, she called him. He was in the front, moving back and forth, studying her.

Monelle Gerger had been around the world twice by the time she was nineteen. She'd hitched through Sri Lanka and Cambodia and Pakistan. Through Nebraska, where women stared at her eyebrow rings and braless boobs with contempt. Through Iran, where men stared at her bare arms like dogs in heat. She'd slept in city parks in Guatemala City and spent three days with rebel forces in Nicaragua after getting lost on the way to a wildlife refuge.

But she'd never been so scared as now.

Mein Gott.

And what scared her the most was what she was about to do to herself.

One rat ran close, a small one, its brown body zipping forward, backing up, moving forward again a few inches. Rats were scary, she decided, because they were more like reptiles than rodents. "A snaky nose and snaky tail. And those fucking red eyes.

Behind him was Schwarzie, the size of a small cat. He rose up on his haunches and stared at what fascinated him. Watching. Waiting.

Then the little one attacked. Scurrying on his four needlish feet, ignoring her muffled scream, he darted fast and straight. Quick as a roach he tore a bite from her cut leg. The wound stung like fire. Monelle squealed — in pain, yes, but from anger too. I don't fucking want you! She slammed her heel into his back with a dull crunch. He quivered once and lay still.

Another one raced up to her neck, ripped away a bite then leapt back, staring at her, twitching his nose as if he were running his tongue around his little rat mouth, savoring her flavor.

Dieser Schmerz...

She shivered as the searing burn radiated from the bite. Dieser Schmerz! The pain! Monelle forced herself to lie still again.

The tiny attacker poised for another run but suddenly he twitched and turned away. Monelle saw why. Schwarzie was finally easing to the front of the pack. He was coming after what he wanted.

Good, good.

He was the one she'd been waiting for. Because he hadn't seemed interested in the blood or her flesh; he'd padded up close twenty minutes before, fascinated by the silver tape across her mouth.

The smaller rat scurried back into the swarming bodies as Schwarzie eased forward, on his obscenely tiny feet. Paused. Then advanced again. Six feet, five.

Then three.

She remained completely still. Breathing as shallowly as she dared, afraid the inhalation would scare him off.

Schwarzie paused. Padded forward again. Then stopped. Two feet away from her head.

Don't move a muscle.

His back was humped high and his lips kept retracting over his brown and yellow teeth. He moved another foot closer and stopped, eyes darting. Sat up, rubbed his clawed paws together, eased forward again.

Monelle Gerger played dead.

Another six inches. Vorwärts!

Come on!

Then he was at her face. She smelled garbage and oil on his body, feces, rotten meat. He sniffed and she felt the unbearable tickle of whiskers on her nose as his tiny teeth emerged from his mouth and began to chew the tape.

For five minutes he gnawed around her mouth. Once another rat scooted in, sank his teeth into her ankle. She closed her eyes to the pain and tried to ignore it. Schwarzie chased him away then stood in the shadows studying her.

Vorwärts, Schwarzie! Come on!

Slowly he padded back to her. Tears running down her cheek, Monelle reluctantly lowered her mouth to him.

Chewing, chewing...

Come on!

She felt his vile, hot breath in her mouth as he broke through the tape and began to rip off larger chunks of the shiny plastic. He pulled the pieces from his mouth and squeezed them greedily in his front claws.

Big enough now? she wondered.

It would have to be. She couldn't take any more.

Slowly she lifted her head up, one millimeter at a time. Schwarzie blinked and leaned forward, curiously.

Monelle spread her jaws and heard the wonderful sound of the ripping tape. She sucked air deep into her lungs. She could breathe again!

And she could shout for help.

"Bitte, helfen Sie mir! Please help me!"

Schwarzie backed away, startled by her ragged howl, dropping his precious silver tape. But he didn't go very far. He stopped and turned back, rose on his pudgy haunches.

Ignoring his black, humped body she kicked the post she was tied to. Dust and dirt floated down like gray snow but the wood didn't give a bit. She screamed until her throat burned.

"Bitte. Help me!"

The sticky rush of traffic swallowed the sound.

Stillness for a moment. Then Schwarzie started toward her again. He wasn't alone this time. The slimy pack followed his lead. Twitching, nervous. But drawn steadily by the tempting smell of her blood.

Bone and wood, wood and bone.

"Mel, what do you have there?" Rhyme was nodding toward the computer attached to the chromatograph- spectrometer. Cooper had once more retested the dirt they'd found in the splinter of wood.

"It's still nitrogen-rich. Off the charts."

Three separate tests, the results all the same. A diagnostic check of the unit showed it was working fine. Cooper reflected and said, "That much nitrogen — maybe a firearms or ammunition manufacturer."

"That'd be Connecticut, not Manhattan." Rhyme looked at the clock. 6:30. How fast time had raced past today. How slowly it had moved for the past three and a half years. He felt as if he'd been awake for days and days.

The young detective pored over the map of Manhattan, moving aside the pale vertebra that had fallen to the floor earlier.

The disk had been left here by Rhyme's SCI specialist, Peter Taylor. An early appointment with the man. The doctor had examined him expertly then sat back in the rustling rattan chair and pulled something out of his pocket.

"Show-and-tell time," the doctor had said.

Rhyme had glanced at Taylor's open hand.

"This's a fourth cervical vertebra. Just like the one in your neck. The one that broke. See the little tails on the end?" The doctor turned it over and over for a moment then asked, "What do you think of when you see it?"

Rhyme respected Taylor — who didn't treat him like a child or a moron or a major inconvenience — but that day he hadn't been in the mood to play the inspiration game. He hadn't answered.

Taylor continued anyway, "Some of my patients think it looks like a stingray. Some say it's a spaceship. Or an airplane. Or a truck. Whenever I ask that question people usually compare it to something big. Nobody ever says, 'Oh, a hunk of calcium and magnesium.' See, they don't like the idea that something so insignificant has made their lives pure hell."

Rhyme had glanced back at the doctor skeptically but the placid, gray-haired medico was an old hand at SCI patients and he said kindly, "Don't tune me out, Lincoln."

Taylor had held the disk up close to Rhyme's face. "You're thinking it's unfair this little thing causing you so much grief. But forget that. Forget it. I want you to remember what it was like before the accident. The good and bad in your life. Happiness, sadness... You can feel that again." The doctor's face had grown still. "But frankly all I see now is somebody who's given up."

Taylor had left the vertebra on the bedside table. Accidentally, it seemed. But then Rhyme realized the act was calculated. Over the past months while Rhyme was trying to decide whether or not to kill himself he'd stared at the tiny disk. It became an emblem for Taylor 's argument — the pro-living argument. But in the end that side lost; the doctor's words, as valid as they might be, couldn't overcome the burden of pain and heartache and exhaustion Lincoln Rhyme felt day after day after day.

He now looked away from the disk — to Amelia Sachs — and said, "I want you to think about the scene again."

"I told you everything I saw."

"Not saw, I want to know what you felt."

Rhyme remembered the thousands of times he'd run crime scenes. Sometimes a miracle would happen. He'd be looking around and somehow ideas about the unsub would come to him. He couldn't explain how. The behaviorists talked about profiling as if they'd invented it. But criminalists had been profiling for hundreds of years. Walk the grid, walk where he's walked, find what he's left behind, figure out what he's taken with him — and you'll come away from the scene with a profile as clear as a portrait.

"Tell me," he prodded. "What did you feel?"

"Uneasy. Tense. Hot." She shrugged. "I don't know. I really don't. Sorry."

If he'd been mobile Rhyme would have leapt from the bed, grabbed her shoulders and shaken her. Shouted: But you know what I'm talking about! I know you do. Why won't you work with me?... Why are you ignoring me?

Then he understood something... That she was there, in the steamy basement. Hovering over T.J.'s ruined body. Smelling the vile smell. He saw it in the way her thumb flicked a bloody cuticle, he saw it in the way she maintained the no-man's-land of politeness between the two of them. She detested being in that vile basement, and she hated him for reminding her that part of her was still there.

"You're walking through the room," he said.

"I really don't think I can be any more help."

"Play along," he said, forcing his temper down. He smiled. "Tell me what you thought."

Her face went still and she said, "It's... just thoughts. Impressions everybody'd have."

"But you were there. Everybody wasn't. Tell us."

"It was scary or something..." She seemed to regret the clumsy word.

Unprofessional.

"I felt —"

"Somebody watching you?" he asked.

This surprised her. "Yes. That's exactly it."

Rhyme had felt it himself. Many times. He'd felt it three and a half years ago, bending down over the decomposing body of the young policeman, picking a fiber off the uniform. He'd been positive that someone was nearby. But there was no one — just a large oak beam that chose that moment to groan and splinter and come crashing down on the fulcrum of Lincoln Rhyme's fourth cervical vertebra with the weight of the earth.

"What else did you think, Amelia?"

She wasn't resisting anymore. Her lips were relaxed, her eyes drifting over the curled Nighthawks poster — the diners, lonely or contentedly alone. She said, "Well, I remember saying to myself, 'Man, this place is old.' It was like those pictures you see of turn-of-the-century factories and things. And I —"

"Wait," Rhyme barked. "Let's think about that. Old..."

His eyes strayed to the Randel Survey map. He'd commented before on the unsub's interest in historical New York. The building where T.J. Colfax had died was old too. And so was the tunnel for the railroad where they'd found the first body. The New York Central trains used to run aboveground. There'd been so many crossing fatalities that Eleventh Avenue had earned the name Death Avenue and the railroad had finally been forced to move the tracks belowground.

"And Pearl Street," he mused to himself, "was a major byway in early New York. Why's he so interested in old things?" He asked Sellitto, "Is Terry Dobyns still with us?"

"Oh, the shrink? Yeah. We worked a case last year. Come to think of it, he asked about you. Said he called you a couple times and you never —"

"Right, right, right," Rhyme said. "Get him over here. I want his thoughts on 823's patterns. Now, Amelia, what else did you think?"

She shrugged but far too nonchalantly. "Nothing."

"No?"

And where did she keep her feelings? he wondered, recalling something Blaine had said once, seeing a gorgeous woman walking down Fifth Avenue: The more beautiful the package, the harder it is to unwrap.

"I don't know... All right, I remember one thing I thought. But it doesn't mean anything. It's not, like a professional observation."

Professional...

It's a bitch when you set your own standards, ain't it, Amelia?

"Let's hear it," he said to her.

"When you were having me pretend to be him? And I found where he stood to look back at her?"

"Keep going."

"Well, I thought..." For a moment it seemed that tears threatened to fill her beautiful eyes. They were iridescent blue, he noticed. Instantly she controlled herself. "I wondered, did she have a dog. The Colfax woman."

"A dog? Why'd you wonder that?"

She hesitated a moment then said, "This friend of mine... a few years ago. We were talking about getting a dog when, well, if we moved in together. I always wanted one. A collie. It was funny. That was the kind my friend wanted too. Even before we knew each other."

"A dog." Rhyme's heart popped like beetles on a summer screen door. "And?"

"I thought that woman —"

"T.J.," Rhyme said.

"T.J.," Sachs continued. "I just thought how sad it was — if she had any pets she wouldn't be coming home to them and playing with them anymore. I didn't think about her boyfriends or husbands. I thought about pets."

"But why that thought? Dogs, pets. Why?"

"I don't know why."

Silence.

Finally she said, "I suppose seeing her tied up there... And I was thinking how he stood to the side to watch her. Just standing between the oil tanks. It was like he was watching an animal in a pen."

Rhyme glanced at the sine waves on the GC-MS computer screen.

Animals...

Nitrogen...

"Shit!" Rhyme blurted.

Heads turned toward him.

"It's shit." Staring at the screen.

"Yes, of course!" Cooper said, replastering his strands of hair. "All the nitrogen. It's manure. And it's old manure at that."

Suddenly Lincoln Rhyme had one of those moments he'd reflected on earlier. The thought just burst into his mind. The image was of lambs.

Sellitto asked, "Lincoln, you okay?"

A lamb, sauntering down the street.

It was like he was watching an animal...

"Thom," Sellitto was saying, "is he all right?"... in a pen.

Rhyme could picture the carefree animal. A bell around its neck, a dozen others behind.

"Lincoln," Thom said urgently. "You're sweating. Are you all right?"

"Shhhhh," the criminalist ordered.

He felt the tickle running down his face. Inspiration and heart failure; the symptoms are oddly similar. Think, think...

Bones, wooden posts and manure...

"Yes!" he whispered. A Judas lamb, leading the flock to slaughter.

"Stockyards," Rhyme announced to the room. "She's being held in a stockyard."